Yes, the Iran War Has Destroyed Trump’s Pres­i­den­cy

Uncat­e­go­rized

Yes, the Iran War Has Destroyed Trump’s Pres­i­den­cy

But the dev­il is in the details.

Pho­to by The White House via X Account/Anadolu via Get­ty Images

No one would claim that the Iran War has been a polit­i­cal god­send for Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and the Repub­li­can Par­ty. But some Israel-First con­ser­v­a­tives are will­ing to say—and late­ly have been inces­sant­ly saying—that the Iran War hasn’t been a polit­i­cal scourge.

Those Israel-First con­ser­v­a­tives are wrong, even if the dev­il is, at least part­ly, hid­den in the details. The Iran War has dam­aged Trump’s approval rat­ings, con­sumed his pres­i­den­cy, and dark­ened the GOP’s prospects in the upcom­ing midterm elec­tions.

A chief pro­po­nent of the argu­ment that Trump hasn’t suf­fered all that much from the Iran War is Ben Shapiro of the Dai­ly Wire. Shapiro’s polit­i­cal analy­sis is plain­ly moti­vat­ed by the fact that he was a loud and influ­en­tial pro­po­nent of the war who promised—falsely, as it turned out—that Iran couldn’t close the Strait of Hor­muz, a choke­point for the glob­al ener­gy trade.

These days, Shapiro seems to be implic­it­ly acknowl­edg­ing the war is very unpop­u­lar while try­ing to argue this fact has noth­ing to do with the declin­ing approval rat­ings of the pres­i­dent who launched it. We should thank Shapiro, for he has expressed his new argu­ment in such a way as to help us uncov­er those dev­il­ish details that make the Iran War a not-entire­ly-straight­for­ward sto­ry of polit­i­cal calami­ty.

“There’s an op right now to pre­tend that the real rea­son for Pres­i­dent Trump’s unpop­u­lar­i­ty is for­eign pol­i­cy, but that is not true, by the polling data, it is not true,” said Shapiro on a recent episode of his pod­cast. “The real­i­ty is that Amer­i­cans have afford­abil­i­ty con­cerns, Pres­i­dent Trump came into office say­ing he was going to alle­vi­ate the afford­abil­i­ty con­cerns. He has not in fact alle­vi­at­ed the afford­abil­i­ty con­cerns, and there­fore, his polling num­bers have con­sis­tent­ly slid since Lib­er­a­tion Day.”

This is a bit like me say­ing my wife isn’t mad at me because of the drink­ing, but because I drunk­en­ly crashed the car.

The Iran War, as every­one now knows, has dri­ven up prices at the pump—prices which, unfor­tu­nate­ly for Trump, are promi­nent­ly dis­played on every major street across the coun­try. On the eve of the war, reg­u­lar g …